Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

  In New York, the two Virginians conferred with Livingston as well as Aaron Burr, who had replaced Philip Schuyler as one of New York’s two senators. The alert Robert Troup suspected a plot to strip Hamilton of power in his own backyard. “There was every appearance of a passionate courtship between the Chancellor [Livingston], Burr, Jefferson and Madison when the two latter were in town,” he apprised Hamilton. “Delenda est Carthago, I suppose, is the maxim adopted with respect to you.”3 Delenda est Carthago: Carthage must be destroyed and obliterated. These fighting words, quarried from the pages of Roman history, signaled the start of interminable warfare between Hamilton and Jefferson, which was to tear apart Washington’s cabinet and the country at large. The conflict went beyond the personal clash between Washington’s two most gifted officials and contrasted two enduring visions of American government. “Of all the events that shaped the political life of the new republic in its earliest years,” Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick wrote in their history of the period, “none was more central than the massive personal and political enmity, classic in the annals of American history, which developed in the course of the 1790s between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.”4 This feud, rife with intrigue and lacerating polemics, was to take on an almost pathological intensity.

  As noted, Hamilton and Jefferson at first enjoyed cordial relations. “Each of us perhaps thought well of the other man,” Jefferson recalled, “but as politicians it was impossible for two men to be of more opposite principles.”5 In combating Hamilton’s cabinet influence, the courtly Jefferson, who hated confrontation, operated at a severe disadvantage. “I do not love difficulties,” he once told John Adams. “I am fond of quiet, willing to do my duty, but [made] irritable by slander and apt to be forced by it to abandon my post.”6 By contrast, the bumptious Hamilton savored the cut and thrust of controversy. Fast on his feet, sure in his judgments, informed on every issue, he was as dazzling and voluble in debate as Jefferson was retiring. By early 1792, any pose of civility between the two secretaries disappeared, and Jefferson remembered them “daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.” By the end of their tenure, the two adversaries could scarcely stand each other’s presence.

  Today we cherish the two-party system as a cornerstone of American democracy. The founders, however, viewed parties, or “factions” as they termed them, as monarchical vestiges that had no legitimate place in a true republic. Hamilton dreaded parties as “the most fatal disease” of popular governments and hoped America could dispense with such groups.7 James Kent later wrote, “Hamilton said in The Federalist, in his speeches, and a hundred times to me that factions would ruin us and our government had not sufficient energy and balance to resist the propensity to them and to control their tyranny and their profligacy.”8 In many passages in The Federalist, Hamilton and Madison inveighed against malignant factions, although Hamilton conceded in number 26 that “the spirit of party, in different degrees, must be expected to infect all political bodies.”9 Hamilton associated factions with parochial state interests and imagined that federal legislators would be more broad-minded— “more out of the reach of those occasional ill humors or temporary prejudices and propensities which in smaller societies frequently contaminate the public councils,” he said in number 27.10

  Nevertheless, it was Hamilton, inadvertently, who became the flash point for the formation of the first parties. The searing controversy over his programs exploded idyllic fantasies that America would be free of partisan groupings. His charismatic personality and far-reaching policies unified his followers, who gradually became known as Federalists. By capitalizing the term used for supporters of the Constitution, the Federalists tacitly implied that their foes opposed it. The Federalists were allied with powerful banking and merchant interests in New England and on the Atlantic seaboard and were disproportionately Congregationalists and Episcopalians.

  At the same time, the mounting fear of Hamilton among Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters cohered into an organized opposition that began to call itself Republican. Alluding to the ancient Roman republic, this was also a clever label, insinuating that Federalists were not real republicans and hence must be monarchists. Often Baptists and Methodists, Republicans drew their strength from rich southern planters and small farmers. They defined their beliefs, in large measure, by their dread of Hamilton’s system and employed anti-Hamilton rhetoric as shorthand to express their solidarity. Jefferson distinguished the two parties by saying that Federalists believed that “the executive is the branch of our government which needs most support,” while Republicans thought that “like the analogous branch in the English government, it is already too strong for the republican parts of the Constitution and therefore, in equivocal cases, they incline to the legislative powers.”11

  Elkins and McKitrick describe “the emergence of parties” as “the true novelty of the age” and date their onset to around 1792.12 It is tempting but misleading to think of the Federalists as the patrician party and the Republicans as representing the commoners. “The controversy which embroiled the two champions was not basically concerned with the haves and the have-nots,” James T. Flexner once wrote of the clash between Hamilton and Jefferson. “It was between rival economic systems, each of which was aimed at generating its own men of property.”13 In fact, the Federalist ranks had plenty of self-made lawyers like Hamilton, while the Republicans were led by two men of immense inherited wealth: Jefferson and Madison. Moreover, the political culture of the slaveholding south was marked by much more troubling disparities of wealth and status than was that of the north, and the vast majority of abolitionist politicians came from the so-called aristocrats of the Federalist party.

  The sudden emergence of parties set a slashing tone for politics in the 1790s. Since politicians considered parties bad, they denied involvement in them, bristled at charges that they harbored partisan feelings, and were quick to perceive hypocrisy in others. And because parties were frightening new phenomena, they could be easily mistaken for evil conspiracies, lending a paranoid tinge to political discourse. The Federalists saw themselves as saving America from anarchy, while Republicans believed they were rescuing America from counterrevolution. Each side possessed a lurid, distorted view of the other, buttressed by an idealized sense of itself. No etiquette yet defined civilized behavior between the parties. It also was not selfevident that the two parties would smoothly alternate in power, raising the unsettling prospect that one party might be established to the permanent exclusion of the other. Finally, no sense yet existed of a loyal opposition to the government in power. As the party spirit grew more acrimonious, Hamilton and Washington regarded much of the criticism fired at their administration as disloyal, even treasonous, in nature.

  One last feature of the inchoate party system deserves mention. The emerging parties were not yet fixed political groups, able to exert discipline on errant members. Only loosely united by ideology and sectional loyalties, they can seem to modern eyes more like amorphous personality cults. It was as if the parties were projections of individual politicians—Washington, Hamilton, and then John Adams on the Federalist side, Jefferson, Madison, and then James Monroe on the Republican side—rather than the reverse. As a result, the reputations of the principal figures formed decisive elements in political combat. For a man like Hamilton, so watchful of his reputation, the rise of parties was to make him even more hypersensitive about his personal honor.

  If, on the domestic side, Hamilton’s bottomless chest of programs precipitated the rise of parties, equally inflammatory were political convulsions in Europe— specifically, whether U.S. policy should tilt toward England or France. Much of the debate’s fervor sprang from the fact that the colonists had fought a war against England with France as their chief ally. Beyond this obvious backdrop, England and France functioned as proxies in the domestic debate over what kind of society America should be. For Jefferson and Madison, the problem was not simply that Hamilton was pro-British but that his po
licies would replicate aspects of the British government they loathed. And for Hamilton, the French Revolution was a bloody cautionary tale of a revolution gone awry.

  Jefferson possessed a long-standing grudge against Britain. Back in 1786, he had received a glacial reception in London from British officials, and their insufferable condescension had left a residue of implacable malice. “That nation hates us, their ministers hate us, and their king more than all other men,” Jefferson fulminated after two months in England.14 It may be significant that Hamilton, who never visited Europe or experienced firsthand the insolence that stung Jefferson and Franklin, found it easier to warm to the British. Besides the dependence of Virginia tobacco planters upon British credit, Hamilton thought that some southern hostility toward Britain also dated from wartime experience: “It is a fact that the rigor with which the war was prosecuted by the British armies in our southern quarter had produced . . . there more animosity against the British Government than in the other parts of the United States.”15

  With evergreen memories of the Revolution, many Americans viewed Britain warily, and Hamilton had to preach the unpalatable truth that England was a more suitable trading partner for America than France, the clear sentimental favorite. The United States still had not escaped economic dependence on England, which consumed nearly half of American exports and accounted for three-quarters of American imports. Even that understated the dependence, since many British imports were articles of everyday use—cutlery, pottery, and the like—whereas France specialized in wine, brandy, women’s hosiery, and other luxury goods. As an exponent of commercial realism in foreign affairs, Hamilton thought it better for America to operate temporarily as a junior partner in Britain’s global trading system than to try to undercut Britain and align itself with France.

  By virtue of his background, Hamilton may have been well disposed toward the British. His father, descended from Scottish nobility, had probably diverted his son with tales of the British Isles. The illegitimate boy may have identified with his father’s lapsed patrician heritage. Nor would Hamilton have felt alone in his emotional affinity for England. The Revolution had been a family feud, with all the ambivalent feelings that implied. It had been their violated rights as Englishmen that had driven the colonists to revolt. Immigration soon diversified the population mix, but in the 1790s the country’s Anglo-Saxon character remained largely intact.

  Jefferson often told of a dinner discussion that he had about British politics with Adams, Knox, and Hamilton in Philadelphia in 1791. They were discussing the “corruption” of the British political system—the system of royal patronage and pensions, the unequal size of electoral districts, and so on—when the following exchange occurred:

  Mr. Adams observed, “Purge that constitution of its corruption . . . and it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.” Hamilton paused and said, “Purge it of its corruption . . . and it would become an impracticable government. As it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed.”16

  Jefferson gave this comment a sinister gloss, but Hamilton was merely saying that the Crown needed patronage to offset Parliament’s power of the purse. In Federalist number 76, Hamilton had described the tendency of popular assemblies, in England and elsewhere, to encroach upon the executive branch. Admiration for Britain’s unwritten constitution and representative government had been commonplaces of colonial rhetoric. John Marshall said of prerevolutionary America, “While the excellence of the English constitution was a rich theme of declamation, every colonist believed himself entitled to its advantages.”17 Only seven months before the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote, “Believe me, dear Sir, there is not in the British empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do.”18 During the fight to ratify the Constitution, Patrick Henry praised the British constitution as superior to the new American version. It was not illogical for patriots to see their new government as realizing British ideals that had been wantonly trampled on by the Crown. It was France, not England, that had long been associated with despotic government, and Hamilton’s high praise for England was not as heretical as Jefferson pretended it was.

  To Jefferson, it sometimes seemed that Hamilton wasn’t just content to run the Treasury Department but wanted to annex the State Department to his domain. Some of this can be ascribed to Hamilton’s ambition, some to the minute size of Washington’s cabinet, and some to the fact that Hamilton’s system hinged on customs duties from mostly British imports. The affairs of Treasury and State could not easily be pried apart. As mentioned earlier, even as Jefferson lobbied for closer trade ties with France in early 1791, Hamilton had launched freelance contacts with George Beckwith, an informal emissary of the British government.

  Hamilton had told Beckwith that Britain could help her case by granting full diplomatic status to the United States and naming an official ambassador. Americans felt demeaned that Britain had sent no representative since the Revolution. Hamilton’s hints bore fruit when the British sent twenty-eight-year-old George Hammond to Philadelphia in late 1791. Already a seasoned diplomat, Hammond commenced the first of many private chats with Hamilton. Hammond wrote to London, “I had a very long and confidential conversation with Mr. Hamilton . . . in the course of which the opinion I had entertained of that gentleman’s just and liberal way of thinking was fully confirmed.”19 Hammond withheld his credentials from Washington, however, until the United States agreed to post an envoy to London.

  George Hammond arrived at a critical juncture, with the United States and Britain still trading endless recriminations about which side had reneged on the peace treaty. America chided Britain for failing to surrender its northwest forts and not compensating planters for slaves it had spirited away, while Britain complained that America still had not paid off prewar debts to its creditors. Hamilton impressed upon Hammond the vital need for Britain to relinquish the forts and conceded the justice of British claims for repayment of old debts. The one issue that Hamilton again refused to push vigorously was compensation for emancipated slaves—a vital point for Jefferson. When Hammond downgraded the importance of this item, he noted with pleasure that Hamilton “seemed partly to acquiesce” in his reasoning.20

  It is possible to fault Hamilton for poaching on Jefferson’s turf with Hammond while also recognizing that he salvaged talks that Jefferson wanted to sabotage. Jefferson treated Hammond to a frigid reception such as he himself had received in London. Hammond complained of the secretary of state that “it is his fault that we are at a distance. He prefers writing to conversing and thus it is that we are apart.”21 Hamilton despaired when Jefferson dredged up stale arguments about the justice of the American Revolution, and he apologized to Hammond for “the intemperate violence of his colleague,” assuring him that Jefferson’s views were “far from containing a faithful exposition of the sentiments of this government.”22 Jefferson’s pro-French bias prevented any real progress from being made in Anglo-American relations during his tenure at State. “When the British minister wanted to know whether a thing was or was not unreasonable,” Elkins and McKitrick note, “he found the Secretary of the Treasury a better guide than the Secretary of State.”23 Hamilton, for his part, subverted moves by Jefferson to negotiate a commercial treaty with France. This internecine warfare between two ambitious, relentless politicians began to immobilize policy in the Washington administration.

  On issue after issue, ranging from redemption of war debt to creating a national bank, Washington had sided with Hamilton against Jefferson and Madison. Washington shared many values with Hamilton, relied on his eclectic knowledge, and tended to be swayed by his judgments. This posed a dilemma for Republican critics of the administration because Washington was still America’s hero and a political untouchable; to assail him outright was thought to be political suicide. Hamilton, vulnerable as Washington never could be, therefore became the necessary bogeyman.
<
br />   How could Jefferson hound Hamilton from office without tipping his hand? A proficient political ventriloquist, Jefferson was skilled at using proxies while keeping his own lips tightly sealed. The mouthpiece he chose to broadcast his views was the poet Philip Freneau. The Republicans had been bedeviled by the Gazette of the United States, a paper edited by a former Boston schoolmaster, John Fenno, who was adoring in his treatment of Hamilton. Hamilton had urged Fenno to start the paper in 1789 and later raised money to rescue it from financial distress. It was a quasi-official paper, since Fenno did work for the federal government and was even listed in the 1791 Philadelphia directory as an officer of the U.S. government. Jefferson denounced the Gazette as “a paper of pure Toryism, disseminating the doctrines of monarchy, aristocracy, and the exclusion of the influence of the people.”24 Jefferson and Madison decided to groom Freneau as a foil to Fenno and make him editor of a Republican newspaper.

  Educated at Princeton, Freneau had been a friend and classmate of James Madison before the Revolution. As a crew member on a revolutionary privateer, Freneau had been captured by the British and subjected to six harrowing weeks aboard a prison ship, leaving him with a lasting detestation of England. The so-called Poet of the Revolution, Freneau was known for his scathing ridicule of English royalty, including his caustic description of George III as “the Caligula of Great Britain.”25 He had also rhapsodized about Washington as “a second Diomede[s]” whose actions might have awed a “Roman Hero or a Grecian God.”26